Monthly Archives: March 2019

Fifty is the new……what was I saying?

6 Comments

Another turn around the sun has brought me to fifty. As I always do on my birthday, I wished my Winnie the Pooh a happy birthday as we have shared this day since the day I turned one. Winnie looked slightly dismayed when I told him I was fifty today. He was doing the calculations in his head and, although he is a bear of very little brain, he slowly realized it will be his turn next year.

(image credit)

I remember my dad giving my mom a birthday card on her fiftieth that read, “Fifty and Fabulous” and I could have sworn he was being a lovely husband and cushioning the blow for what must have been a traumatic event for my mom. But he was bang on. Somewhere along my path to get here, I stopped worrying about the numbers and concentrated on my happiness and I truly do feel fabulous.

I have forgiven myself for the mistakes I made in my past and left them in the past where they belong. I have stopped defending the fact I am single woman, happily living life on my own in my little house. I have stopped trying to convince people that alone does NOT mean lonely. I have given myself permission to be a bit selfish sometimes and practice saying the word, NO. And I have found great humility in volunteering my time to help my fellow community members.

Fifty is what you allow it to be and, for me, fifty just proves the year on my birth certificate is correct and nothing else. Happy fiftieth birthday to me!

 

The week of turning fifty

6 Comments

For the first time in almost a decade, I have taken time off from work. I don’t really like to travel so I have never taken advantage of the vacation time I have at work, but this year is different.

This week is the week of my fiftieth birthday and I decided it was a significant enough occasion to release myself from the constraints of my job and take some much-needed time for myself. Although Sunday was spent as it always is, making crockpot meals for our local Food Bank, yesterday was spent lounging around the house in the morning and taking myself shopping in the afternoon in search of an outfit to wear for my birthday dinner on Thursday. I immediately remembered how much I disliked malls and shopping for clothes!

Today, although not yet my birthday, is the most anticipated day of my week off. Today is the day I will get my first, and most likely only, tattoo. The thought of a permanent picture on my body never crossed my mind because I could never come up with an image that meant enough to me to permanently etch it into my flesh. But the more I thought about doing something monumental for my fiftieth birthday, the more the idea of a tattoo kept invading my conscious thoughts. When the picture eventually presented itself, it was perfect.

(image credit)

Having lost both of my parents long before their time, this image is the perfect blend of the things that remind me the most of my mom and dad. My mom loved butterflies and my dad loved owls. From where I sit in my living room as I write this post, I can see the framed needlepoint monarch butterflies my mother created in the seventies and the carved wooden owls my dad hung in the living room of our childhood home. I couldn’t think of a more appropriate image to have as a permanent reminder of the two people I loved the most.

Turning fifty is not a burden, it’s a gift. It affords me the chance to look back on a half a century of love, laughter, friendship and memories. Turning fifty gives me the wisdom to prioritize the people and the things that are most important in my life. Turning fifty allows me to ignore the things I have learned from and have been able to leave in my past. And turning fifty makes me truly appreciate the fact I still feel like I am in my thirties.

I can’t imagine a better way to welcome fifty than to embrace the journey I have taken to get here, to hold close the people I value most and to look forward to what is yet to come.

The moving company that should be named Deliverance

2 Comments

Being a writer allows me the freedom to embellish but, typically, my posts on this blog are steeped in truth and this post is no different.

A dear friend of mine moved on Tuesday. The process to get to the actual move itself was arduous and emotionally draining. When the day finally came to move, the moving company brigade was nothing like I expected. I arrived just as the team began to unload the first truck and everything seemed normal. But all of that quickly changed.

What seemed like a cohesive team of movers steadily morphed into what could only be described as a slapstick comedy show. What should have been a choreographed routine of piling boxes and other items to make the best use of space, became a haphazard placement of boxes in random places. Movers were entering the house and discarding their shoes as they went down the hallway, only to have the other movers trip over those same shoes with the next item to enter the house, narrowly missing the walls with the items they were carrying. To say it was unorganized would be an egregious understatement.

And then there was Peaches. She may only weigh 110 pounds soaking wet but she could lift just as much as her male coworkers. She began the process with strength and confidence but as the seconds turned into minutes, each item she lifted seemed to carry the burden of the weight of the truck itself. She became quickly dehydrated and began to spontaneously shed layers of clothing. The dramatic flair she conveyed with each piece that was discarded, and the voice that could have been created by a helium balloon, took everything from comical to moderately disturbing. It wasn’t until I looked out into the driveway and saw her leaning against my friend’s car, I knew we were in trouble. She was arched over the front bumper of his SUV in the pose of Alex from Flashdance moments before the bucket of water was dropped.

(image credit)

I realized at that moment we had gone from quirky to surreal. To say she was as high as a kite is to say humans need oxygen to survive. As the move progressed, so did the stages of her buzz. When the last item was removed from the truck, the sigh of my friend’s relief could have drowned out the sound of the passing train.

With the exception of a few items that did not fare the move so well, we thought the process had ended after an equally strange conversation with the man in charge who did not want to leave the house. That was not the case. The moving truck was now stuck in the driveway spinning its wheels on the ice. Thankfully, the rest of the moving team had been waiting to exit en masse and pulled the moving truck out of the driveway. I could swear I heard the sound of duelling banjos as they drove down the road.

A pinch of something extra

2 Comments

“I’m just someone who loves cooking and for whom sharing food is a form of expression.” ~Maya Angelou

A great portion of my time off is spent in my kitchen. It is the place I feel most like myself and can let the rest of the world revolve as it wants to outside my kitchen walls. My father loved to cook and was one of those talented people who could open the fridge, combine a bunch of ingredients and come up with something really tasty. (don’t ask about the scrambled eggs made with eggnog – that was an epic fail)

My mom was also a good cook but was very much a recipe follower and rarely threw caution to the wind when it came to her ingredients. My brother and I both grew up watching the family dynamic in the kitchen and quickly began to love cooking. My foray into kitchen triumphs began with my Easy-Bake Oven and I remember my brother in his teens making homemade crepes for our family for dinner.

Cooking, for me, really is a form of expression. It allows me to connect with others on a level far beyond conversation and it lets me share myself with other people. There is no bad day that can’t be made a little better with something yummy that has been made at home. There is an invisible ingredient that makes it taste so much better than any food you can buy at a store or a restaurant.

If I ever have a bad day or want to make someone else’s day a little bit brighter, you know where I’ll be.

Why, thank you 10pm, I would love a snack

4 Comments

I came home last night at 9:30 pm after a meeting / potluck dinner and decided I wanted a late-night snack. Since I had leftovers of my spinach dip and pumpernickel bread, this snack was readily available. I try not to eat past 7:00 pm most nights but spinach dip is a favorite so the decision was pretty much made. I went to bed at 11:30 pm and woke up this morning with memories of a very strange dream.

I am always amazed when I wake from a dream and can remember every crazy part of it. Last night’s dream was in color, as my dreams usually are, and bits of the full color spectrum appeared in every strange scene.

My dreams generally consist of pieces of my day but last night was an anomaly. There were massive structure fires raging with a beautiful azure blue sky in the background. Plumes of black and grey smoke rose from the fires as I stood, high on a hill, on top of a frozen koi pond. The fish were an array of spectacular shades of orange, yellow and blue.

Near the end of the dream, I went down to examine the remains of the buildings. There were children running in and out of the charred skeletons wearing green shorts and my brother was sitting on the living room floor playing poker with his friends. When I turned the corner to leave, I looked up and saw my mother’s yellow, daisy-covered long johns hanging over a door that magically survived the fire.

Nothing in my dream can be tied to any of my reality yesterday. I still do have my mother’s long johns but they have not been out of their drawer in a very long time. Unless I want to experience the acid-trip of dreams again any time soon, the spinach dip will be a daytime snack.

What is the strangest dream you can remember?

 

 

When tomorrow starts without you….again

2 Comments

These three days are my worst days. Every year I think I can gloss over them and blog about something entirely different until I realize how cathartic it is to blog about these three days.

Today, March 7th, marks the fifth anniversary of my mom’s passing. When I think about the fact there have been one thousand, eight hundred and twenty-five days since I was jolted from sleep by the call that would change my life forever, I am astonished. I can live that morning over like it was just yesterday and feel the same gut-wrenching emotion I felt on that day. I remember having no feeling in my face and having trouble speaking to the poor woman delivering the devastating news to me at 7:00 am. I recall with great clarity how much my hand shook when I called my brother to let him know and I can almost count how many painful seconds went by as we cried together on the phone and said nothing. It was just yesterday, but it was five years ago. Time is funny that way. It can take moments and stretch them into what feels like an eternity.

Tomorrow is my bridge day. It is the day between the anniversary of losing my mother and losing my father. Saturday, March 9th, will mark the thirteenth anniversary of losing my dad. Although I have been able to replace my memories of him on his best days with the memory of watching him take his last breath, the latter image still seeps into my mind more often than I would like to admit.

The thing I have to remember to hold closest to me is the fact that tomorrow will start again, and though it comes without the presence of my mom or my dad, it starts again. And thankfully it starts again with the memories of them both and all of the wonderful moments they left for us to remember them by. Tomorrow starts again with new moments of joy, new memories to make, new tears, new friends, new adventures and new reasons to look forward to the start of another day. And although tomorrow may start on a sad note, it stills starts and it holds the promise of becoming something wonderful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Always in like a Lion

2 Comments

“It will take time, but the strength that comes after will be beautiful,  I promise you.” ~ J.E. Rivera

In my emotional register, March always comes in like a Lion and goes out like a Lamb.  Although my parents passed away eight years apart, March 7th and March 9th are very difficult days since they mark the days I lost the two most important people in my life.  My dad died on March 9th in 2006 and my mom died on March 7th in 2014.  When I look at those dates, I am shocked to see so much time has marched on since they were with us.  It seems like yesterday we were all together and I can still hear their laughter as our family shared some wonderful times.

But time has a way of taking moments and turning them into memories in the blink of an eye.  The pain of loss never goes away but, with time, there is a beautiful strength that comes with the perpetual grief.

Through the years my parents  have been gone, I have come to understand that pain can be turned into power.  I have taken that gigantic sense of loss and molded it into my ability to overcome an immeasurable atrocity.  I have survived the worst and I spend each day being stronger than the last and I can now see the beauty in that strength.